


The winter of 1867

by josephides



Category: Alpha and Omega - Patricia Briggs, Mercy Thompson Series - Patricia Briggs
Genre: Baby Werewolves, Crack, F/M, Future Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-20
Updated: 2020-06-20
Packaged: 2021-03-04 06:41:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,027
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24829270
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/josephides/pseuds/josephides
Summary: Leah presented the wolf with a picture of a baby.The wolf was sort of confused and wondered if she was proposing a snack?
Relationships: Bran Cornick/Leah Cornick
Comments: 10
Kudos: 342





	The winter of 1867

**Author's Note:**

> A definition: A work of fan fiction that is absurd, surprising or ridiculous, often intentionally.

Leah hated Christmas with a burning passion. 

It seemed that just when they were coming out of the mourning period that was October and November, then, _BAM!,_ it was suddenly full cheer ahead. Decorations and carols and manic gift-buying and _family, family, family_ and a rotund pink-cheeked-pervert who climbed down chimneys. The whole thing was grotesque.

“I’ll do it,” Anna volunteered.

“It’s my responsibility,” Leah said to the kitchen table.

“You do it every year. You do _Thanksgiving_ , every year, which is basically a wake. Let me do Christmas and give you a break. I can cook.”

Leah lifted her head. “You don’t have the space.”

“I can cook here.”

Leah pulled a face. Anna meant well – an expression that she often found herself applying to her daughter-in-law after fifteen years of coming to terms with her presence – but it was out of the question. “I’ll try to convince Bran to keep the numbers down,” she said, sighing and looking around her spotless kitchen. Yesterday, she’d finally cleared the debris from Thanksgiving. And now it was going to begin again.

*

Bran and Leah were going through a good patch. They did have them.

They had some distinct and memorable bad patches, of course, which were what most people seemed to remember of their relationship. Most of the early years of their mating had been sub-par – Bran still grieving over his lost mate and Leah realising she’d married a man without a heart.

The winter of 1867, yes, that had been Very Bad. She had scars from that one. 1905 until 1920. Deeply unsettling. Still had the dreams. The years around WWII hadn’t been great but, to be fair to them both, the fae had been mostly responsible for that one. The Swinging Sixties, when he’d left her. Poor. The entirety of the period between 1983 - Mercedes Thompson’s arrival in the Aspen Creek pack – and 2020, when he behaved as if he didn’t even like her, let alone love her. She shuddered to think of it.

“Am I right in thinking you and Anna spent most of your lunch today watching Bert’s boy chop firewood?” Bran asked her, appearing silently in the living room where she was reading and listening to music.

She choked on her smoothie, having flashbacks to the time she had – stupidly – thought it would be fun to flirt with Asil. Neither her mate or Asil had been thrilled. 

“Ah—“ Leah didn’t know what to say. Certainly not that Bert’s thirty-year-old human son was in peak physical condition and watching him do manual labor gave both of them a thrill. 

“He’s _that_ good looking?”

“It’s the tattoos,” she said faintly.

Bran laughed and shook his head, went back towards his study.

Phew, she thought, picking up her cell to send Anna a quick message. _Busted re: Bert’s kid,_ she wrote quickly.

Anna sent back the scream emoji. _Dammit! That means Charles knows!_

 _Haha_ , Leah wrote. Anna was comparatively newly mated. Her mate would not be so easy-going.

Bran came back, apparently having dwelt on this further and had come to new conclusions. “He’s human _,_ ” Bran pointed out.

“I know. I cannot explain it,” she said. If anything, it made it filthier. Really, _really_ wrong.

For a moment, they looked at each other. Bran lifted a hand and crooked a finger. “Come with me,” he said, sternly.

Leah put down her smoothie and her eReader and followed him upstairs to receive her punishment.

*

“Sixteen people,” Leah told Anna, morosely.

“Oh no, that’s more than last year.”

“I wasn’t in a strong negotiating position.”

Anna thought about it. “Worth it.”

*

The Hauptmans’ children were going to be an issue, Leah thought, assessing her very much not child-proofed home. It wasn’t just the ordinary human-children thing – with their fragile skulls and tendency to lick electrical sockets - it was also that both apparently turned into some kind of coyote-wolf mix spontaneously. There were a lot of _expensive_ chewable things in Leah’s home now.

“I think that’s going a step too far,” Bran said, when he found her wrapping the legs of a 17th Century escritoire in the upstairs hall in 5mm thick foam. “Anyway, they can’t come.”

She pulled the tape from her mouth. “What?” she shrieked. She’d done most of the house already. It had taken _hours_.

“Adam’s human daughter has invited them, last minute.”

Leah was momentarily annoyed that this human had been raised in estimation above the Marrok.

Bran smiled at her, broadly. “Don’t be perverse,” he advised, though his voice was warm with laughter. “You didn’t even want them to come.”

“But I’ve –“ She gestured to the foam around the spindly Mahogany legs of the antique furniture in front of her and made a noise of deep frustration and stood up. “Take me out for dinner,” she instructed, crossly, pouting.

He kissed her. “Certainly.” He kissed her again, then again. Then one thing led to another and Leah found herself testing the sturdiness of the escritoire herself and coming to the conclusion that it would probably have survived the Hauptmans children if it could survive two grown werewolves.

*

Minus the Hauptmans, Leah was down to twelve people. Even that was vast quantities of food. They had two restaurant-scale ovens but she would still need Anna and Charles to also cook part of the meal if she was to ensure everyone was full to bursting. The food coma was important because that way no one would speak for the rest of the afternoon. It was, in Leah’s opinion, the best part.

Bran, of course, wanted to try a new turkey recipe. “No, really, it says here it’s guaranteed to be moist,” he said, carrying the tablet with the recipe on it, attempting to get her to read it. She was moving around the house, picking up the detritus that was left around the place by the never-ending stream of monsters who treated the downstairs like it was an extension of their own homes.

“No,” she said.

“All we need is a deep fat fryer.”

“No.” She dropped everything in the big wooden trunk she kept by the front door, which had a sign that read ‘CONTENTS WILL BE BURNT IN 24 HOURS IF NOT REMOVED’.

“I’ll bet I can find one on Amazon. Also seventeen litres of peanut oil. That’s a lot, isn’t it,” he mused.

Leah rolled her eyes and went upstairs so she could scream into a pillow.

*

The gift situation was appalling.

Her tactics were two-fold. The first was essentially spying. She went through all of Bran’s drawers, his wardrobes, his study and listed everything that might conceivably need replacing. Then she sat at his laptop in his study and went through his search history, an absolute replica of his rabbit-warren brain, trying to glean any new interests that might have sprung up. It was important she did this _before_ he started thinking about turkey recipes or she would just be wading through a series of tedious cooking blogs that never got to the point.

Her second tactic was more obvious – she asked him. Not outright, obviously. At night, when it was dark, when he was moments away from coming, she’d lean over him, her hair a curtain around his face as she moved above him, and whisper, “What do you want for Christmas?”

One year he’d cried, _“The Encyclopædia Britannica!”_ , which was, as well as being useful, also quite funny. She had always had a faintly Pavlovian response to them after that and was sad when the Internet effectively made them redundant.

This year, however, _this year_ , Bran set her the impossible task.

*

“A baby,” Anna repeated.

“Yes. _Where am I going to get a baby in time for Christmas?”_ she hissed, passing down the first box of decorations. One down, she thought, twelve more to go. Merry freaking Christmas. She always put the decorations off until the last minute and always regretted it. It was a chore that took ten hours to execute and that was before they did the lights outside.

“Bran wants to have a baby.”

“Yes, I know.”

“Leah,” Anna sighed, massaging the bridge of her nose, which was a habit she had picked up from Bran and thus, to Leah, very annoying. “Don’t you think this is fairly monumental?”

“Is it?” Leah thought about it as she grabbed the next box, pulling it towards her. She hated the attic. So dusty. “I think he just thinks I wouldn’t kill one now.”

“Yes, that’s… obviously a positive. But, Leah, when Charles and I adopted Soo-Jin we went through a lot of talking, we had home visits, there were quite a few let-downs. It was… not easy.”

Leah liked Soo-Jinn. Anna’s child was reassuringly no-nonsense. She was more than happy to have _her_ at Christmas. Give her a computer game and she was entirely silent. She wished more adults were like that.

“Exactly,” Leah said. “There’s not a chance we can do all that by Christmas.”

*

Leah bit the bullet and went to ask him directly.

“Ah,” Bran said, looking embarrassed. “That was a sort of… spur of the moment thing.”

“So you don’t want a baby?” He was shifty. She sighed. “You do.”

“Not explicitly for Christmas,” he said, coming around his desk. He stuck his hands in his back pockets, a sure sign that he wanted to touch her, so she pulled them out and put them around her waist. He nuzzled the side of her head. “Sam is going to make an announcement, at Christmas. They’ve had a break-through.”

‘They’ could only mean the fertility team that he oversaw. Leah began to get nervous. “Uh-huh,” she said.

“They have found a way to, for lack of a better word, pause the ability for a werewolf to Change.” Bran kissed her neck. “Long enough for a pregnancy to reach full term, even if the baby is a werewolf, too.”

Very nervous. “Uh-huh.”

“At this point, they haven’t actually _tried_ this on a pregnant female.”

Oh hell no, she thought.

*

Christmas was tense, for Leah at least. Sam made his announcement, to the delight of everyone except for her.

“There’s a spiritual part, too. Obviously, the wolf spirit has to be in complete agreement,” Sam was explaining, as they toasted the announcement with champagne. “But initial tests suggest that given the strong instinctual drive to procreate that this isn’t a problem. Mostly, then, it boils down to sheer stubbornness.”

Leah shifted uncomfortably. She could see Anna was enraptured by the idea and Charles was, at least, intrigued. For an Omega, probably going for months without the Change wasn’t a problem. To Leah, it sounded insane. 

Leah poked Soo-Jinn because her fixed smile was becoming tired and unconvincing. “Come on, squirt, help me in the kitchen.”

Soo-Jinn was an able and silent assistant as they decanted the lunch into Tuppaware, ready for the monumental sandwiches that would form that evening’s dinner. Actually, too silent, Leah thought, used to the occasional comment at the very least. Soo-Jinn was thoughtful, she wasn’t _dumb_.

She slanted a look to her ‘granddaughter’. The little girl was frowning hard. “What’s up?” Leah asked.

“Mom and Dad would like a real baby, wouldn’t they?”

Leah caught on. “Well, yes, probably. Anna was mad for you, when you were a baby.”

“No, I mean. Their real baby.”

“Oh, you mean biologically. Yes, I guess so.” 

Big, fat tears started to roll down the little girls face. Soo-Jinn was a ninja crier. “Oh, don’t do that,” Leah said, panicking, and tearing off squares of kitchen towel. “Why are you doing that?”

“They’d like a real baby better than me.” Soo-Jinn’s face crumpled.

“Whaaaaaat?” Leah crouched down, dabbing at the tears frantically. If someone walked in, she knew they’d think Leah had made her cry. It had taken years before anyone had trusted her alone with her. “Don’t be stupid. _You’re_ their daughter, blood or not.”

Soo-Jinn threw her arms around Leah’s waist, pressing her increasingly wet face into Leah’s silk blouse. “Oh great,” she muttered. She decided it was time for more capable reinforcements. “Anna? Charles? Could you come help me?”

*

In bed, Bran pretending to sleep next to her, Leah had a brief conversation with her wolf. Or what passed as a conversation. Leah’s wolf was highly visual. When Soo-Jinn was a toddler, Anna had taught her words by holding up flash cards. It was a bit like that.

Leah mentally held up a picture of a full moon.

The wolf liked that.

She held up a picture of a wolf running through the forest at night.

The wolf like that as well.

Leah presented the wolf with a picture of a baby.

The wolf was sort of confused and wondered if she was proposing a snack?

Leah shuddered and tried again. This time she showed the wolf a picture of Bran, holding a baby.

The wolf wondered if she was going to have to _share_ the snack.

“Oh for the love of…” Leah rolled onto her other side, facing Bran. She squeezed her eyes shut and this time pictured herself and Bran and a baby. She gave the baby Bran’s hazel eyes and her golden streaked hair. She made sure she and Bran were smiling and the baby was gurgling.

The wolf cottoned on and rolled about happily. _Yessssssssss_ , she said.

Finally. Then she put the picture of the full moon back up and blacked it out, replacing it with the baby.

The wolf kind of got it. She whined but then licked the baby’s face.

Leah opened her eyes to find Bran was watching her. She growled and rolled back over. “Don’t get your hopes up,” she told him.

*

Samuel looked like an alien had landed in his office and started tap-dancing.

Leah tried to look innocent. “I’m just curious. I am, after all, a font of knowledge about female fertility for the women of our species.”

This was true. She was the one who trained all the women on What You’ll Never Expect Again both before and after they Changed. 

“Right. Okay,” Samuel said, unconvinced. He went through the basic details he had given his audience at Christmas.

“And would you be implanting fertilised eggs or would the hypothetical guinea pig just have to get knocked up by her partner? If she had one?”

Sam scratched his neck. “We’re actually planning to do both – half the volunteers will try the ‘natural’ way. We suspect it will end up taking the same amount of time and we’ll want to see if the results vary according to method.”

She nodded. She and Bran had used various contraceptive methods throughout their relationship. Withdrawal, condoms – in various, homespun forms before the arrival of the prophylactic – and finally modern medicine. Prior to the pill, nothing had been 100% effective and Leah had got pregnant, and miscarried, more times than she could count. She didn’t think they would have a problem there.

“Are you guys… thinking about it?” Sam moved a ballpoint around his desk.

Leah said nothing. If anyone was going to hear about her deliberations, it was going to be Bran.

*

“You once told me I’d make a terrible mother,” she said, walking into Bran’s office.

“Jerome, I’ll have to call you back.” Bran put down the phone. “To be fair, I think that was the winter of 1867.”

Leah pouted; they did not speak of the winter of 1867. “You told everyone we couldn’t keep Mercedes because I would kill her.”

“Wolves _hate_ coyotes. Even Bryan found it difficult and he was half the dominant you are.” Bran cleared his throat. “Are you thinking about it?”

“I’ve never even considered it before,” she said honestly. She had been born into a werewolf family. From a young age, she’d had it drummed into her that if she became a werewolf she wouldn’t have children. If she stayed human, she’d die, probably of syphilis.

She thought about the baby with its hazel eyes. Her wolf rolled around happily.

“I’d probably enjoy the part where you tried to knock me up,” she said, reluctantly.

Bran’s nod was very vigorous. “Oh, me too.”

*

Sam was excited. Oh, not because the prospect of a half brother or sister filled him with all the happy fluffy emotions. No, he was _scientifically_ excited.

Bran and Leah exchanged glances. She rolled her eyes.

“This is great. You’re both off the charts, magically speaking,” he said, filling in a form on his tablet. “That will be incredibly valuable data. And of course your ages. A real geriatric mother, Leah!”

Leah spun to look at her mate. “Kill him,” she told Bran.

“Maybe later,” Bran murmured, stroking a hand down her back.

“So, first, we’ll need to schedule some meditation exercises. You’ll need to prep your wolf—“

“Done that. She’s fine.”

Sam’s eyebrows rose. “Really. Well, humour me, for the data, then.” He cleared his throat and fixed his eyes at a point somewhere between them. “I’m assuming you’re going to go for the natural method of conception.”

Leah grinned. “That’s the fun part.”

*

She looked at the little chart she had been given. The green dots were when she could possibly get pregnant. “That’s not a lot,” she said, surprised.

Plus, Sam said as she had to come off her contraception, it might take a few weeks for things to get normal. Maybe even a few months.

Bran took the little chart. He shrugged. “Let’s just think of all the other times as practice,” he suggested, tossing it towards the bin.

They had a lot of sex normally. Bran had the body and metabolism of a twenty-two-year-old-male on some kind of high performance drug. A stiff breeze made Bran horny. Plus, Leah was hot.

Now they had a lot of sex plus some very, very focussed sex during the small window of opportunity when Leah was about to ovulate. This sex, Leah had to admit, was really, really hot. Bran got sort of mindless, like he was willing his swimmers to do their job, and then he’d surprise her throughout the day. Doing laundry? Sex. Watching TV? Sex. Hiking to visit the Wildlings? Sex. She had no idea when he fitted work in. 

It took three months for them to conceive. “Pregnant,” Sam said. “And one of our first, too.”

Bran looked smug, as if he’d done all the work.

*

The first Moon Recall, as they were calling the injection, made Leah feel funny. Kind of slow. She had to stay in the clinic under observation for four days. At some point, she had been told, it would knock her out and she would sleep through the actual full moon.

“It’s like I’m missing blinks,” she whispered to Bran, who had set up a tablet on the table so they could watch a movie together. “Can you go get them?”

“Sure. I’ll get them for you,” he said, kissing her forehead.

She watched the little people on the little screen for a bit. “I’m tired now.”

“Go to sleep.”

“I can’t feel my wolf,” she said, sadly.

“She’ll be back.”

*

It was the same the next full moon. Then the next. In between, her wolf returned, but sulky. Leah flashed her the baby picture, which perked her up a bit.

“I’m getting fat,” she told Bran, grumpily. She’d gone for a run and her leggings had been uncomfortable.

“You’re not,” Bran said as she stripped off the spandex in front of him.

Turns out, pregnant women made Bran horny too. Who’d have thought it.

*

Fourth full moon was harder. Fifth was worse. Sixth was…

“I don’t like it, I don’t like it, I don’t like it,” she whimpered, fighting Bran who was trying to hold her to him.

“Da, we need to give her a sedative.” Bran growled. “That’s _not_ helping. You have to be calm so she can be calm. You need to work together.”

Bran sung to her, his voice soft in her ear. She focussed on it and on it alone, ignoring the chemical scent of the clinic that she was starting to hate. Her panic over the wolf’s absence receded. “I don’t like it,” she whispered to him, privately, surrounded by Sam’s doctors and the impending sedative.

He stroked the hair from her face. “I know, my love, I know.”

*

She didn’t want to think about the seventh. The eighth… the eighth…

“Remember when you left me,” she said, pacing the small room they had put her in with him. She had tried to kill someone. Possibly everyone. She could smell blood. They were hiding her wolf from her.

Bran was leaning against the wall, his eyes closed. She’d broken his arm and they’d had to set it. “I didn’t leave you. You left me. You always get this confused.”

“You did. You went away.”

“No. _You_ left _me_. You bought a house in San Diego. I bought the house on the street behind you and watched you.”

That didn’t _sound_ right. “Why would I leave you?”

“Because I was a bastard to you.”

“Oh.”

*

“She’s very excited,” Leah said, maybe hours, or days later. The full moon had passed but they had extended her isolation by a full week, increasing the dosage of the Moon Recall.

Bran moved slightly behind her, waking. “Who is?”

“The baby.”

His hand stroked over her bump. “Is she? Why’s that?”

“She’s going to bite Sam. When she comes out.”

Bran chuckled, his breath puffing out against her neck. “Oh yeah? Sounds like my kind of girl.”

Leah tried to find her wolf, to tell her, but she was nowhere to be found. She cried, ninja tears and Bran kissed every one.

*

Sam cut her open with a silver knife. She was pretty loopy. “He’s always wanted to do this,” she said, whispering to Bran, only it wasn’t really a whisper.

“Shush,” Bran said.

“You shush,” she replied. “Oh, look, a baby.”

The baby made weird mewling noises. Leah tried to get a look at her open body. Bran pushed her back onto the bed. “I don’t want you to see that,” he said.

“1905,” she said, sagely. He’d cut her open. She remembered that.

Bran flinched. “Exactly.”

Someone gave Bran a baby. He was crying. So was the baby. It was a whole thing.

A woman attempted to open Leah’s gown and she smacked her. She flew across the room. “Whoops,” Leah said, in the commotion. “Is she dead?”

“Leah, do you want to hold your baby?” Bran asked, drawing her attention from the woman being helped to her feet.

“Werewolves can’t have babies,” Leah told him as he settled the wrinkled, mewling thing on her chest.

“You did.”

*

“I’m not doing Thanksgiving, this year,” Leah said. “Or Christmas.”

“No, of course not.”

She narrowed her eyes at him. By her count, Bran had agreed to every single request she’d made since she’d gestated his miracle offspring and Sam had cut her out.

Said miracle offspring lay in the moses basket in Bran’s office, having a little sleep after filling herself up on the milk from Leah’s massive boobs. Bran liked to have the both of them close, so had moved a couch into his office where she was expected to read and nurse the baby like a docile 1950s housewife. She was humouring this, mostly because she was still too tired to do otherwise, though she had woken this morning to the joyful prancing of her wolf spirit and suspected things were about to dramatically improve. She was looking forward to taking the miracle baby on tour.

Right now, Leah was wondering what would break him. She’d made him change every single diaper and he hadn’t batted an eyelid. If she asked him for a drink or a snack, he’d fetch it for her, even if it was something really challenging. Like a pineapple. Or fresh donuts. At 3am.

She watched her mate as he worked, clicking away on his little computer, thinking his clever, clever thoughts. Then it came to her.

“I want another one.”

Sheer horror passed over his face. “ _Absolutely not_ ,” he said, going white as a sheet.

Bingo.


End file.
